Is it at risk?

摘要

"Leadership in fragile times" is the theme of this year's World Economic Forum, the annual conference for the great and the good of the global economy that opened in New York this week. The assembled businessmen and politicians rarely notice the official agenda at this event: their real purpose is to see and be seen with each other. But for once that theme is apt. America has declared war on terrorism, Argentina's financial system has collapsed, and the world economy is enduring the worst slowdown in a generation. Does all this, as some argue, pose a threat to the liberal international order-that is, to globalisation? For the first time in the modern era of global integration, the world's biggest economies (and many emerging ones with them) have stalled at the same time. As a result, the principal measures of economic integration, cross-border flows of goods and capital, showed no advance last year. After growing by 12% in 2000 and by an average of 7% a year throughout the 1990s, the volume of global trade was virtually stagnant in 2001. Foreign direct investment flows also slumped, from more than $1.3 trillion in 2000 to barely half that in 2001, according to UNCTAD, a United Nations agency.